While Europe took a thousand years to break free from blind religious dogma through the Reformation, the United States preserved older forms of faith through early settlers such as the Amish. The 1925 Scopes Trial, which criminalized the teaching of evolution, and the survival of anti-evolution laws until 1967 reveal how deeply pre-modern religious thinking still shapes American society.

This is a continuation of the previous chapter.

The people of Europe finally realized the foolishness of their ways after a thousand years, and through the Reformation they at last drifted away from the Church.

It was from this period that the natural sciences also began to come alive.

There were, however, exceptions.

In the United States, people who had immigrated from Europe before that religious break—old-type believers such as the Amish—took root just as they were.

A symbolic example of this is the trial of the biology teacher John Scopes in 1925, which corresponds to the fourteenth year of the Taishō era in Japan.

In that very year, the Tennessee state legislature enacted a law prohibiting the teaching in classrooms of Darwin’s theory of evolution, on the grounds that it contradicted the biblical description that “all things were created by the Creator.”

Outraged by such foolishness, Scopes, a high school teacher in Dayton, ignored the law and taught evolution.

The trial was held in July of that year, and after fierce debate, he was found guilty on the grounds that he had indeed violated the state law, and was fined 100 dollars.

This alone is astonishing enough, but in fact that state law remained in force until 1967.

In reality, Patrick Buchanan, who became a presidential candidate in one of the earlier elections, denied evolution and declared, “Human beings have the right not to believe such a ridiculous story as that they evolved from apes,” and he even managed to gain a considerable number of votes with such remarks.

This column continues.